GAMING GREEN
Wednesday
July 15, 2026
9:00-10:30 AM EDT

Moderator: Evan Torner

This presentation examines “gamewashing” in analog board games, analysing how ecological themes and sustainability claims may diverge from actual game mechanics and player experience. Drawing on greenwashing scholarship, it proposes a framework to assess the alignment between environmental rhetoric and ludic systems.

This study applies critical discourse analysis to five commercial climate change board games to identify the dominant ‘green’ narratives. The findings reveal that most games reinforce ahistorical, problem-solving approaches rooted in existing economic systems, while arguing for board games’ untapped potential to foster deeper engagement with the colonial and capitalist roots of the climate crisis.

Prasad Sandbhor (he), University of York

In this systemic review of sustainable hobby practises, the aim is to create a “battle plan” for embodied practises, potential changes to how we engage with different material aspects of the larger miniaturing hobby: painting, gaming, crafting, and collecting. The end product of this review is to propose new ways of engaging with the hobby within global miniaturing communities in order to minimize the ecological footprint of the hobby and rethink the ways miniaturing hobbies are engaged with.

Through an analysis of the subreddit r/PokeInvesting during the perceived ‘crash’ of Pokémon card value between October and November 2025, this paper shows how posts of finance memes and portfolio graphs from apps such as Collectr operate to visually financialize Pokémon cards through the nonspecificity of finance rhetoric, highlighting the ways in which game cultures can advance financialization. In understanding the inherently violent nature and history of finance, this paper argues for the necessity of paying critical attention to how finance rhetoric becomes subsumed into game spaces, highlighting the need to understand the relationship between games, game cultures, and financialization.

Moderator: Aaron Trammell

GREEN PLAYERS
Wednesday
July 15, 2026
12:30-2:00 PM EDT

Moderator: Bea Livesey-Stephens

Taking that prompt seriously (if not playfully), this presentation reframes “the new player” in tabletop role-playing games as an identity position that is socially produced, managed, and sometimes stigmatized (rather than a temporary lack of rules knowledge). Drawing on qualitative analysis of textual accounts from a study of Dungeons & Dragons play (a survey of 198 participants with participants’ descriptions of first sessions, learning moments, and table dynamics), we examine how players narrate becoming – and ceasing to be – “green.”

Michael Nixon (he/his), University of Toronto Mississauga

Students’ agency as adults; faculty hesitation to host controversial discussions; or non-gamers’ social-emotional growth are facilitated by zero sessions, cooperative games, role-playing, even self-selecting out of a research survey or playing a game. Participatory consent is a through line across research and academia: volunteering for a study, orienting students to a new course, scaffolding self-advocacy, self-awareness, and agency in offering consent, requesting consent, and critically analyzing whether and how to request, offer, or query levels of consent.

Catherine Bowers (she), Valdosta State University

There are many benefits to health and wellness that come from being in natural spaces, and new research suggests that engaging in nature-filled immersive art generates feelings of calm, purpose, and exploration. Could nature-focused TTRPGs, such as the upcoming therapeutic game Spiritkeep, harness immersion and ego bleed to encourage players to spend time outdoors?

This presentation describes an ANT-based method for understanding objects in larps as actors within a network that includes the game, the players, the characters, and the narratives, and how the resulting perspective highlights an “interpenetration of self and the world of objects and events’.’

GREEN ENVIRONMENTS
Wednesday
July 15, 2026
2:30-4:00 PM EDT

The study examines a corpus of tabletop roleplaying games for themes of ecological resistance and revolution. The guiding question is: are there ‘ecorevolutionary’ TTRPGs?

Anneliese Furlong-Muir (they), University of Manchester

Holger Pötzsch (he), UiT The Arctic University of Norway

Melania Borit (she), UiT The Arctic University of Norway

This presentation is an analysis of Uwe Rosenberg’s ‘Atiwa’ and it focuses on the ways in which relations between humans and animals are depicted in this game using the theory of biopolitics.

This talk presents the findings of an experimental reception study conducted with two versions of a board game about climate change: one made with brown kraft paper and compostable tokens, and another with glossy paper and plastic components. The study examines how the materiality of the game shaped participants’ interpretations of its message, as well as the extent to which they perceived consonance or dissonance between the game’s substrate and its procedural rhetoric.

We are developing a solarpunk game that pushes back against the idea that technology can easily fix the climate crisis. Using psychedelic visuals and analog sounds, our game shows that ecological entanglement is a perceptual transformation and not just a resource management puzzle.

Samin Shahriar Tokey (he), Worcester Polytechnic Institute

GREEN HISTORIES
Wednesday
July 15, 2026
4:30-6:00 PM EDT

This presentation examines 1,960 environmental board games that were published over the past century using data from the Board Game Geek website. This project traces the prevalence, complexity, and educational focus of environmentally themed board games. By taking the perspective of a historical overview, this research illustrates how players, designers, and publishers alike have transformed environmental board games into tools for environmental education, scientific modeling, and fostering public engagement.

Katelyn E Jennings (she), Ohio State University

Drawing on Umberto Eco’s Model Reader, this presentation argues that Pax Pamir: Second Edition re-greens even experienced players by unsettling the competencies they bring from broader board game culture. In doing so, it turns familiar board game common sense into something visible, contestable, and pedagogically productive.

This talk tells the story of the first “green games,” from 1980-1997, and the cooptation and capture of this genre by corporate interests. It argues that longstanding frameworks for studying and designing games reinforces the corporate chokehold on the political capabilities of games and suggests a modeling framework as an alternative.

In this presentation, I outline how the Australian freeform, a form of away-from-the-table roleplaying, developed in the years following the first self-described freeform in 1982. I then discuss a project to bridge the gap between freeforms and other artforms by documenting occurrences of the Australian freeform into the AusStage database as part of Australian Creative Histories and Futures, and I conclude by touching on the challenges of creating a suitable data model for the freeform.

DESIGNING GREEN
Thursday, July 16, 2026
9:00-10:30 AM EDT

This contribution explains along card board, paper and printing technologies, how a shift in Game Design occurred from a system of contrast to an immersive surface that reorganizes play as navigation through space rather than sequences of signs.

This presentation explores how civic and NGO actors in Prague imagine alternative urban nature futures based on research combining Critical Utopian Action Research (Egmose 2020), ethnography, and a bespoke tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG). Drawing on Arturo Escobar’s use of ontological design, the study utilizes Nalluvia, a custom setting for the Fate Condensed system, to place global capital and relational ontologies on equal footing.

This presentation explores how W.E.I.R.D. (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) frameworks continue to shape environmental education and climate communication in Africa, often overlooking local ecological realities and communal learning traditions. Using ATi, a Ghanaian deforestation awareness board game, as a case study, it argues that culturally grounded game design can both strengthen local environmental education and offer globally relevant perspectives for climate learning across diverse educational contexts.

Eugenia Teiko Narh (she),

University of Media, Arts and Communication (UNIMAC)

Maxwell Beganim (he), Open Knowledge Ghana

Robertson Nii Nortey (he), Leti Arts

Emmanuel Ameyaw (he), Africa Centre for Nature-Based Climate Action

This presentation reflects on game design as a decolonial arts-based research practice and a means for Indigenous self-determined storytelling. It draws from the author’s recent trip to the Arctic Winter Games, the biannual circumpolar sport competition for northern and arctic Indigenous athletes, where she accompanied a team of Indigenous game designers to support them in developing board games inspired by the Dene and Arctic competitions featured.

Moderator: Evan Torner

GREEN IDENTITIES
Thursday, July 16, 2026
12:30-2:00 PM EDT

Moderator: Edmond Chang

This presentation explores what it means to design the color Green as philosophically “Eastern” in Magic: The Gathering. 

Drawing on queer game studies, this presentation examines four tabletop games centered on alien–human communication, focusing on how alien roles are played in contrast to human ones. By examining alien embodiment as playable alterity, it argues that these games not only represent the Other but also mediate non-normative experiences of interaction.

This presentation examines community responses to the racebending of major characters in the Magic: The Gathering set Tales of Middle Earth. This set, featuring characters, locations, and mechanics inspired by Tolkien’s writings and Jackson’s films, is notable for its depictions of Aragorn, Eowyn, and Theoden as having dark skin. These depictions contrast with other popular representations which often feature Men, Elves, Dwarves, and Hobbits as White, with some notable exceptions.

This paper examines Black women’s experiences of Spades as a culturally situated practice, foregrounding the kitchen table as a site where strategy, banter, and embodied performance function as pedagogical mechanisms of belonging and skill acquisition. Drawing on network gatekeeping theory and reparative play frameworks, it argues that Spades operates as both a protective and instructional space in which play offers critical insight into gendered, racialized, and analog game cultures and their intersections with design bleed and fugitive game studies.

Marlene Gaynair (she), Washington State University

GREEN TTRPGS
Thursday, July 16, 2026
2:30-4:00 PM EDT

Moderator: Shelly Jones (they)

This presentation draws parallels between film-making’s green screen and the GM’s screen to analyze how TTRPGs evoke audiovisual experiences, illustrated through an interview with Spanish designer Ismael Díaz Sacaluga.

Universitario EUSA

Despite the accessibility of the form of tabletop role-playing games and their proliferation in recent years, there are no standard metadata systems or centralized sites of discovery for these games. As librarians and catalogers, we will present potential methods and guidelines for classifying TTRPGs based on user-centered research that prioritizes the terminology, philosophy, and search priorities of players and designers with a focus on the challenges that this kind of search functionality might pose to newbies interested in these games.

Megan Piccirillo (she), University of Washington

SJ Scheidegger (they), University of Washington

This presentation examines how session zero functions as a meta-collaborative infrastructure for integrating “green” players, understood as newcomers to a system, a table, and a shared fictional ecology, into tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs). It argues that session zero supports onboarding, expectation setting, safety practices, and shared narrative alignment before play formally begins.

A thematic analysis of Reddit posts from r/rpghorrorstories cataloguing the violations of safety by players in table-top role playing games. By focusing on player-authored accounts of negative gameplay, this project focuses on ethics, consent, and community norms in gaming culture.

Allyson Etter (she), Texas Tech University

Megan Condis (she), Texas Tech University

GREEN ACTUAL PLAY
Thursday, July 16, 2026
4:30-6:00 PM EDT

It’s not often that we as humans are able to reckon with the consequences of humanity’s scientific follies and failures directly through the lens of the nature around us. In Dimension 20’s Burrow’s End, GM Aabria Iyengar gives viewers just that, but through a loveable family of stoats all gifted with what they refer to as the Blue. This presentation will examine how Iyengar as GM utilizes the fantastic in turning radiation and nuclear fallout into magic, and how the long-reaching effects of that radiation change how the stoats interact with Last Bast, their native environment, and the other creatures — including humans — that inhabit it on a fundamental level.

This paper examines how actual play reinterpretations of green-skinned fantasy characters both inherit and challenge long-standing racialised associations between greenness and otherness in Western media. Focusing on Fjord Stone from Critical Role, it explores how collaborative storytelling and performance can either reinforce or critically rework metaphors of racial alienation within fantasy.

This paper examines the historical relationship between Dungeons & Dragons actual play media and sex work, arguing that actual play formats created an unusually visible convergence between tabletop role-playing cultures, affective labour, and platform-mediated intimacy. Situating actual play within broader histories of precarious creative labour, parasociality, and online performance, the talk explores how questions of legitimacy, stigma, sexuality, and safety have been negotiated within contemporary tabletop cultures.

Tom Apperley (he), Canterbury Christ Church University

There is a noticeable number of aromantic characters in actual play, especially when compared to mainstream media. This representation causes greater acknowledgment of aromantic identities within the tabletop role-playing community, leading to positive impacts on the aromantic community and the wider queer community.